Erica has been working on this book in one form or another for as long as I’ve known her. At first her motivation seemed impenetrably esoteric to me: Why would anyone want to trace the tangled roots of modern left-wing thought back to their origin in distinctly “irrational,” even mystical, ways of thinking? Gradually, I began to see the deeper question here: What kind of authorities do we listen to and who do we ignore? What makes one kind of person credible and another dismissable? In modern Western culture, the accepted authorities have tended to be white males with extensive formal educations. Hence the female indigenous health worker introduced early on here barely gets a hearing from Erica’s male anarchist comrades, because, as a religious person, she is not “rational.” And clearly she is not male.
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But just because so many conspiracy theories are right-wing lies doesn’t mean that there are no possible conspiracies that we ought to take seriously. The combined efforts of foreign policy experts, journalists, and politicians to promote the notion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction may be counted as a “conspiracy.” So too, perhaps, can the events leading up to George W. Bush’s dodgy election in 1999. When I talked to a noted political scientist about the role of conspiracies in history, she was silent for a moment, and then said that she wished she had heard this years ago, because there are so many events that hint at possible conspiracies—like the serial assassinations of liberal and radical leaders in the sixties (the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X.) But she knew that that line of thought had been closed to respectable academics.
Be warned: this is a challenging book, one that sent me off to Google page after page. But it’s been worth every bit of the effort. There are no boundaries here between academic disciplines or, when you reflect on it, even between centuries. Like my social scientist friend, I found it powerfully disinhibiting, inviting me to think in ways I had always rejected and toward conclusions I had never imagined. You will have a similar experience. Young as she is, Erica Lagalisse has given us an exhilarating lesson in how to think and a what a politically involved person should think about.
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intro
9
I realized I was conducting an (auto)ethnographic research project, being at once the viewer of YouTube videos and the viewer of my own and others’ YouTube viewing: Why did people find some videos more seductive than others? What were the narrative and cinematographic devices that effectively appealed to my own (racialized, gendered, classed) subjectivities? I found John Anthony West’s series on Magical Egypt amusing, but why?
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Was it wise, I wondered, to highlight the association of anarchism with charged topics like Freemasonry, given all of the intrigue I had recently witnessed on YouTube about “secret societies” and their role in contemporary politics? Besides, I was already a rather isolated feminist in my academic department, quickly becoming known as “the anarchist” as well (in spite of the fact that my scholarly work is critical of “anarchism”), and was also somewhat stigmatized among my peers due to my working-class background. If it were to become known that I was studying Freemasonry alongside all of that, I might lose my tenuous grasp on respectability.
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The neofascist (“alt-right”) movements in the United States do enjoy a significant amount of support from persons who enjoy theories of global power involving Freemasons, Illuminati, and Jews, all popularly referred to as “conspiracy theory.” Precisely on account of so much disinformation regarding the revolutionary fraternity in popular culture and its real-world effects, it may be politically useful to clarify the record on these topics—an ambitious project, to which this little book is but a modest contribution. I do hope readers make use of this essay in such a practical way.
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Put bluntly, “conspiracy theorists” may sometimes be stubborn white men, but then again so are anarchists, who may be attached to some frustrating ideas about power as well.
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Any study of “conspiracy theories” raises questions of epistemology, in which all ideas stigmatized as “conspiracy theories” are not equal; some fail reasonable tests of rationality, others do not. ..The Illuminati is not in control of world government, nor are Jews in control of the banking system, yet is it also wrong to posit the ruling class as a “conspiring” to destroy us? Does the U.S. Food and Drug Agency really have the public’s interests at heart? Are people really wrong to suspect the government and its agencies of conscious malevolence? Bourgeois professional associations arguably constitute a class-based and class making conspiracy in and of themselves. The fact is that all politics involves “conspiracy,” whether “from above” or “from below.”
For practical pedagogical purposes such as these, I have explicated my sources very clearly. At times my lengthy footnotes may appear eccentric, yet given how both the internet and published print are saturated with sensationalized accounts of “secret societies” and related intrigue, which makes it difficult for either lay or academic researchers to penetrate the historical record surrounding these phenomena, I purposefully present this work as a bibliographic essay of sorts, useful for the student who wishes to investigate further. The reader will notice that I often offer multiple sources in reference to a given point, sometimes explaining briefly the character, approach, or historical context of each one, as well as the non-English sources to which the authors refer to in turn: much of the relevant primary material and reliable scholarly secondary sources with respect to the clandestine revolutionary fraternities is not in English. According to my own skill set, I have not reviewed the German and Italian sources as much as I have the French- and Spanish-language works, yet in the course of my essay I do make an effort to provide the reader with a non-exhaustive list of important non-English-language sources and clearly indicate the relatively scarce English-language scholarship on the topic of Freemasonry and other clandestine fraternities and the historical relation of these to classical anarchism.
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Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, the particular metaphysics of modern anarchism and its relation to social and historical context has not so far received the attention it deserves. This is no doubt partially due to the bias of many anarchists against religion, and the bias of many scholars against anarchism, but is perhaps also because the topic requires delving into the relationship between anarchism, occult philosophy, and “secret societies”—all charged topics, even independently. As explained above, at first I resisted engaging the subject, yet I was increasingly called upon to try. May my readers approach the work generously and forgive certain necessary gaps within such a short, accessible book about such a large, inaccessible topic.
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*Pythagoras himself developed his timeless geometrical theorems by way of his mystical explorations. Nicolaus Copernicus .. Réné Descartes .. Johannes Kepler .. Newton’s ..in the language of science…The conceptual vocabulary of his physics (e.g., “attraction,” “repulsion”) was adopted from the Hermeticist Jakob Böhme via famous alchemist Henry More.
*of math and men ness et al.. but interesting .. all the connections to magic.. that is ok for academian maths and science scientifically et al.. but not intuition maths..
beyond the connections briefly outlined above, the coevolution of Hermetic philosophy with the Classical tradition of the “art of memory” also had much to do with the development of calculus and what came to be known as the “scientific method.”
Briefly put, in the Classical periods of Greek and Roman history, the “art of memory” was a method used by rhetoricians: one was to find natural or man-made architecture where there is internal differentiation and associate parts of a speech with mental images to be imprinted on the spaces offered by the architecture. It was understood that words are easier to remember when associated with images, and that the images that are easiest to remember are ones that are wondrous, personify, and involve action or unfamiliar combinations. As Yates recounts, in the Aristotelian tradition the art was merely instrumental (whether chosen images possessed any meaningful correspondence to words was irrelevant), yet in the Platonic tradition, mnemonic images should be expressive of the transcendental reality. Throughout the Middle Ages, the art of memory was used largely as a way of remembering (Christian) vices and virtues (spiritual concepts were to be remembered by way of emotion-arousing images), yet in the Renaissance, Hermetic philosophy influenced growing Neoplatonic applications: the art was to provide memory of divine, universal knowledge—just as the Egyptians infused statues with cosmic power, so would Ficino’s talismans draw down celestial insights. *It was precisely because man is a microcosm, divine in his origin, that in the work of both Fludd and Bruno (and beyond) he may come to “remember” the divine knowledge he contains. Archetypal images exist in a confused chaos, yet properly inspired mnemonic techniques will find their proper order and thus restore to man his full complement of divine powers
At this juncture we do well to begin considering the question of gender in relation to the “public sphere” and worldly operation broadly speaking. After all, as “magic” itself was gaining respect in certain elite quarters, women were being persecuted as witches precisely for practicing “magic,” wherein we may observe that the perceived danger was not “magic” itself but the gender of its practitioner. While men’s “operation” on the world was sanctioned, women’s equivalent “operation” was increasingly targeted as heresy. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English first pointed out in their feminist reappraisal of the witch hunts, “witches” were generally no more than lay healers, “wise women,” and midwives—indeed, proper empiricists who had “developed an extensive understanding of bones and muscles, herbs and drugs” while those who have gone down in history as the “fathers of science” were still “trying to turn lead into gold.” More than a persecution of “magic” broadly put, the witch hunts were a gendered class war wherein elite males forcibly took over both the conceptual and practical realm of healing from peasant women; as the fifteenth-century Malleus Maleficarum explains, “If a woman dare to cure without having studied she is a witch and must die.”
Ehrenreich and English therefore anticipate Silvia Federici’s more recently acclaimed work undertaken within the Marxist tradition, which articulates the witch hunt as a phenomenon of “primitive accumulation”: just as land, air, and water must first be enclosed as “resources” before the capitalist may profit from the commodities they are then used to produce, so were women enclosed as (reduced to) mere bodies by way of the witch hunts. The persecution of “magic” among “witches” throughout the peasantry was, in fact, a disciplinary measure directed specifically at poor women insofar as it served to enforce the logic of private property, wage work, and the transformation of women into (re)producers of labor. Whereas a common popular misconception of the witch hunts is that they were instigated by peasant men who had not yet discovered “rationality,” they were in fact specifically organized by the Church and modernizing European state, wherein many decades of propagandizing were necessary before reliable complicity among peasant men was achieved. Of course, the fear-mongering by authorities that inspired the witch hunts focused obsessively on baby killing, and women’s traditional knowledge of birth control (“magic”) was indeed being put to good use at the time: the poor dispossessed by the enclosure of the commons could no longer afford to raise children. Fears around a declining population (workforce) and the reproductive autonomy of lower-class women (practicing birth control) was ultimately what distinguished the witch from the Renaissance magician, who demonologists consistently passed over. In fact, the devilish activities of the “baby-killing” witch were often plagiarized from the High Magical repertoire
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Fig. 4. “The Mystical Compass,” Robert Fludd (1617).
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Fig. 6. The compass is again associated with power, here in a certain geometrical and gendered arrangement, by William Blake in “The Ancient of Days,” in Europe: A Prophecy (1794)—“When he sets a compass upon the face of the deep” (Proverbs 8:27).
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Unlike the millenarian and heretic movements before them, these more “modern” social movements consisted of literate radicals more so than peasants and were decisively masculine public spheres. Women’s power within the peasant and heretic movements was ambiguous and never unchallenged, but women were certainly actively involved, partially because the renovated and syncretic Christian cosmologies crafted during the Crusades granted them new footholds, and partially because women had the most to lose in the privatization of the commons. Freemasonry, on the other hand, is what social movements look like after the witch hunts: just as alchemists played at the creation of life while arresting feminine control over biological creation, speculative Masonry emerges in which elite males worship the “Grand Architect” upon the ashes of artisans’ guilds, while real builders are starving. By the time of the Grand Lodge’s establishment in London in 1717, the trade secrets of operative masons had become the spiritual secrets of speculative ones, lodge membership now thoroughly replaced by literate men lured by the ceremony, ritual, and a secret magical history supposedly dating back to the time of King Solomon and the Grand Architect of his temple, Hiram Abiff—Freemasonry itself has always involved a fantastic pastiche of Hermetic and cabalistic lore.(We may also observe a possible influence of the Classical art of memory within the Freemasonic penchant for columns and arches in its symbolism, as well as in its reverence for the “Divine Architect.”
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What is of particular interest to our discussion is that Freemasonic society was decidedly anticlerical, yet espoused a pantheism that infused its social levelling project with sacred purpose.
The Traité des Trois Imposteurs that Masons circulated clandestinely during the eighteenth century refers to Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed as the three “Imposters” in question, yet the coterie who printed it included Toland, who in his Pantheisticon (1720) elaborated a new ritual that claimed to combine the traditions of Druids and ancient Egyptians and included the following call and response: “Keep off the prophane People / The Coast is clear, the Doors are shut, all’s safe/All things in the world are one, And one in All in all things / What’s all in All Things is God, Eternal and Immense / Let us sing a Hymn Upon the Nature of the Universe.” Masons imagined themselves simultaneously the creators of a new egalitarian social order and the protagonists of cosmic regeneration, all articulated in the language of sacred architecture. Theirs was a pyramidal initiatic society of rising degrees and reserved secrets, but one in which all men met “upon the level.”
The Masonic levelling project was not altogether radical. It is true that Masonic lodges were frequented by elite men who instrumentalized them to further consolidate their power, and that the Masonic project was one of limited reforms, one to which Jews, women, servants, and manual laborers were denied entry. It is also true that the Masonic ideal of merit as the only fair distinction allowed room to critique the tension between formal ideals and actual practice, and that Masonic lodges were the *first formal public association in eighteenth-century Britain to take up the cause of the “workers’ question”—albeit on a purely philanthropic level—by founding hospices, schools, and assistance centers for proletarian workers. In prerevolutionary France, lodges first began accepting small artisans, then proletarian workers as well, lowering fees and abolishing the literacy requirement for entrance to this end. By 1789, there were between twenty thousand and fifty thousand members in over six hundred lodges, and it was no longer possible for participants to reasonably claim they were manifesting an egalitarian social order by merely gathering to discuss literature, science, and the cultivation of Masonic wisdom
be you. 